Publishers Vs. Developers

              There has recently been much debate over the role of publishers and developers in the game development industry - not least from Official Nintendo Magazine's feature 'Overcomplicating Publishing' which presented publishers as overbearing and controlling through the medium of Mike Roush, the co-founder of Gaijin Games. Is this a fair assumption though? It's all too easy to think of

publishers as the cold, hard businessmen of the gaming world, stifling creative ambition and drowning puppies on their days off. What is the true role of publishing in game development and how has the publisher, developer relationship changed over the years.
              After reading the aforementioned article, I was le
ft immediately confused by the actual process of game development. That is, how a game moves from production to the publishers to the distribution. In its simplest form, the developer creates the game with possible commission from publishers who then control which products reach the market and do all the scary PR and marketing shizzle.
              Apparently, Mike Roush finds difficulties in the way developers and publishers interact. He suggests that Nintendo needs to move on - make the submission process quick and easy - not the labyrinth of problems and puzzles worthy of Layton and his posse. Steam is a quick online upload site used as a platform for a number of easy game publications that believe it or not, create 10 - 20 times more revenue than console games - sign of the times maybe? Perhaps Nintendo do need to up the game slightly in terms of their submission process - arguing over icon appearance and paperwork is only going to tire and frustrate the common talented game developer.
              The nature of the relationship between the humble, shy nerd of a game developer and the flashy ambition of the publisher has gone through some significant moderations since the days of NES and the discovery of fire. It's possible now to get a game out there without a publisher - just look at all the indie game developers (http://ilikegamesandstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/revolutionary-gaming-with-fezzes-and.html) - possible but very improbable. Kind of like Mario is able to save Princess Peach on his own, but things
would go a lot easier and quicker if he had his mates around to give him a hand. But then his mates might go changing his outfit - blue dungarees were so 1998 and only farmers can get away with caps in this day and age, ultimately manipulating the general manner in which Mario saves ol' Peachy. However, the bottom line is, this is not a utopian world that we live in. Independent game designers have to work FAR harder to produce their games and then get them noticed compared to giant publishers. As much as we hate to admit it - it's all about the green stuff (cash - calm yourself policeman reader). Just look at the fiasco that was Bayonetta 2, after the original game's dismal release on PS3 no publisher would pick up the game for a sequel. This is the sole reason the game may never have come into existence - if it wasn't for the knight in shining armour that is Nintendo. As image conscious as they are, publishers in reality are necessary for a popular game. Ultimately, a lack of financial and marketing support will result in the developer's nightmare - the 'Zombie App'. One that is available but never downloaded. The homeless game, a wasted bout of creativity with no reviews, no comments, no download rates and no revenue just wandering aimlessly through the abyss of download sites. It doesn't bear thinking about so let's take a minute of silence for any game in this limbo of existence before continuing. Perhaps this kind of app store arrangement could work for Nintendo, and already we are seeing the eShop being used slowly for more independent games, it's slow progress but they're trying.
              A real problem for fresh-faced, excitable little developers is the lack of control they may face over their product. Ayabe from the Guild team - a group of individuals working within a team to create their own original games - suggests that "innovation in game design as a whole is diminishing" - essentially creators are conforming to the needs of the end users too much and not standing strong and creating what they want to

create. The Guild lot are a great example of this originality in game design. From a first look at their game 'Bugs vs Tanks' it can be argued that some of that green stuff (yes policeman reader) was included in the creation of their games. This would never have made it to publishing but represents the personal ideas of game developers, not the publisher's assumptions of the audience's requirements - a very different order of events. The ethos of Guild is essentially that all individuals have different wants. Now, this has been applied to both the developers wants and the audience's wants. Guild seem to be the first collection of people to have recognised that an audience is unique, it's like the invention of the wheel all over again. Back to the idea of control, the team behind Guild were working on a lower budget and team size which meant less pressure and more creative control, interesting equation. An equation however that seems to have been ignored by Nintendo, who is looking to increase its team size - interesting. It has been said that publishers mistreat developers - they strangle their creative decisions and demand. No one likes demands. Guild has taught us that publishers need to give developers their freedom in doing what they do best - developing.

             Publishers are like parents. They demand and control but are still an absolute necessity in survival. Your mother will always ask you to complete random jobs around the house before you're allowed to step foot outside the door - as if you're the ONLY person in the world with the qualifications to put the washing on or tidy the lounge but equally you will always ask your mother for £20 before stepping out of the front door. It's a give and take thing. I don't do jobs and my mother would rarely give me £20 before i went to the pub - a tenner maybe. Though I am insanely excited about 'Bugs vs Tanks' and have just seen that it is available now on 3DS eShop in the UK - good times.

Thanks for reading :)

The. Sims. 4

I have a separate Sims blog available for the reading times here http://simlifeblog.blogspot.co.uk/ - it's a bit gay and really for my own sad little pleasure but if you're interested there it is.That's not the point of this post though, oh no. This post is to celebrate the BEAUTY that is the announcement made by EA yesterday. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have The Sims 4. EA has announced its release for 2014, and people, i'm excited. I tried to purchase The Sims 3 back in the olden days of 2009 and realised that my little IBM couldn't quite handle it - so with a new computer for uni i will be spending that crucial loan on all things Simlish. This is the start of a beautiful beginning people.

Revolutionary Gaming with Fezzes and Meat Children

Edmund McMillen, with his Wolverine beard, I don't like his
glasses though :/

I'm watching a documentary at the moment, entitled 'Indie Games, The Movie'. It basically goes into the production and release of two specific independent games. These are games that are independently created by literally 1 or 2 guys in a bedroom with a mac and then sold to Microsoft etc. and downloaded to consoles everywhere. It made me realise the work that really goes into game development, and the scary levels of anger it creates. These two guys created this game 'Meat Boy', a creepy concept of a boy with no skin, going against his antagonist 'Dr Fetus', a fetus in a jar, and this game just represents everything good about simplistic gaming. It took about 550 days for 2 guys to develop it, and it sold about 22000 units in it's first day - earning Edmund McMillen more than he had earned in the last 6 years. I have to admit I haven't actually played the game as of yet, due to my lack of an X-Box (burn me later), I have however seen videos and fallen in love with the feel of the game.

Look at this crazy, slightly cross eyed monkey of a game designer,
granted his beard is less Wolverine, more Comic Book Guy from
Simpsons and his glasses are way nicer than Wolverine but he's still
an angry mofo

This is all very well in a success situation. However, when Phil Fish won awards for his game 'Fez' way back when, he probably didn't envision releasing it nearly 5 years after it was announced, redeveloping it 3 times and losing business partners in the process. This film showed him totally freaking out over this game, and while this idea of the amateur rising is exciting everyone in the gaming world, perhaps some 'amateurs' are just... too... amateur??

Mainstream companies create large scale, high quality games that appeal to a wide market. Independent game developers create simplistic, nostalgic games. The real clincher in this deal, is that the games are so personal to the developers, that they often represent their own ideals, messages and memories. It is this personal touch that is seeking to decrease the gap between developers and players of games, something which i'm totally up for. Two guys spending a year creating a game, then selling it on X-Box live is an embodiment of the revolution of amateur production. We've seen it with YouTube, and MySpace, however now perhaps the gaming world will be hit by the force of the amateur.

I think the only reason the game is called
'Fez' is cos he has a little red group of pixels
protruding from his giant white head. 

Super Meat Boy - bit of a strange concept
but ultimately endearing...

Layton vs. Ace Attorney

Hello again, it's been a while and i'd like to say that this last month I have been working night and day on the post you are about to witness, slaving over a laptop and typing until i 4get how 2 use proper englsh. However, dear friends, I have been enjoying a summer holiday away from AS levels and didn't... really... think to write... a ... blog. I'm sorry :'(.

So, I bring to you dear readers, my opinion concerning the recent news that a new 3D Layton vs Ace Attorney game is being developed as you read this very sentence. I thought this would be an apt opportunity to talk about dear old Layton, and Phoenix Wright (if he is the protagonist, they do like to change around a bit). I think that Layton would be one of my favourite characters in any video game ever produced. There's something organic about the presentation of the mild mannered Englishman that is rarely seen in video games, and is certainly one of the main USP's of the game. I haven't really played Ace Attorney, but the whole meeting of two games, as similar as they are in content, just doesn't sit right. I'd much rather become engrossed in the plotline of a typical Layton game, for example Curious Village, than have an Ace Attorney, Layton spin off in my 3DS. Since i first stumbled across the cross-over game, the concept has seemed alien and just plain wrong. I feel like a desperate mother watching her prodigal son Layton being led away by an older dodgy looking Phoenix Wright. It seems like the Ace Attorney series has tried to up it's own sales by affiliating itself with the humble but brilliant Professor Layton series. Then again, the other games have sold so they must be doing something right - but it's the principle of the thing...

LEAVE VIDEO GAMES ALONE :'(

So here in this Chris Crocker style post, I will give my opinion concerning the sensationalistic aggressiveness of the media's conduct towards video games. Now that you know my stance on the matter, let's get down to the business in hand. 

For some reason, the media feels like it needs to hype up the obviously apocalyptic effects of video games. According to certain sources, video games are obviously creations spawned by the devil himself, with intentions only concerned with mutilation and violence. Certain sources suggest that Grand Theft Auto is the cause of all evil in the world, from school shootings to tsunamis. Certain sources even have the audacity to suggest that video games are responsible for "growing a society of alienated, aggressive, untrusting adults" (Kimberly Thompson for the Boston Globe if you're interested in reading senseless, melodramatic ramblings). These sources are based on their own 'research' that suggest 'links' between aggression and video games. 

It's interesting how the idea that aggressive children may want to play more aggressive games has not been researched as thoroughly as the sensationalist idea that video games are turning the next generation into mindless serial killers. 

It's interesting how children are obviously only now affected by violence in their lives. It's not like children of all generations have been shown respectively the same level of aggression that's seen as violent by their respective eras. Fairytales such as Grimm and Anderson while not as graphically violent, were seen as aggressive in their era, yet where is that generation of murderers? 

It's interesting how the focus has been sadistically centred on the few who are affected, the school shooters and the children prone to aggression, but the vast majority of unaffected children and decent members of civilization who enjoy a COD or a GTA aren't deemed fascinating enough news for hyped up articles. 

From the very same researchers who have slammed video games for their obvious psychopath breeding skills comes this statement "There's absolutely no scientific evidence showing a positive correlation between violence in individuals and the games they play,"... awkwaaarrrddd. 

Video games are a new, 21st century form of craft. Never before has the interaction of the viewer determined the nature of a piece of art. Surely, instead of exploring this minor possible trigger for an innate or built up frustration and aggression, those who are obviously so concerned for the lives of civilians or future of society, however uninteresting it may appear in the news, will all turn their attention to other, more likely explanations for any violence. This is even though adolescent and child violence is at an all time low in the U.S at the moment... just sayin. 

Psychology Stuff: The Sims

And now reader, we will begin our journey through the psychological stuff relating to video games. Why Tabs? I hear you ask, as you are already reaching for the mouse to click off the page and go watch a cute video of a kitten instead. So let's get that out the way first - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8 - all out your system now? Good, let's get down to this shizzle. 

The Sims has been voted one of the most popular video games of all time, which is surprising as it's not a conventionally exciting game, never the less, there are a lot more Sims addicts inhabiting this socially reclusive world than there are extreme fans of GTA, or SSX. In the game, gun fights and car chases are replaced with washing up and baby spawning, yet it has become one of the most widely played games of the 21st century. Since its release in 2000, the true psychological possibilities of the game have been brought to a metaphorical light. 


The game was actually created with human psychology closely in mind. To create the actual sims, ideas such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs were used and personality was created with Myers-Briggs. So, basically The Sims 2 uses the psychology that certain theorists have discovered to be present in humans. This is why many seem to project themselves into the game. Studies which have been completed in this area are mostly exploratory, as the nature of the research is relatively new. In a particular study looking into how a player projects themselves into the game and pass on personal values to their sims, participants were told to play the game for 30 sim days (or about 10 human hours). They also answered a few questionnaires about personality and values (something the 12 year olds in Tonbridge obviously haven't grasped yet) etc. etc. The whole gist of the finding was that people recreate characters in the sims which are closely linked to themselves - we all know this already - it's what we all do when we first get our hands on the game. You make yourself (taller and thinner, with nicer hair and muuuuch more attractive) and then get abducted by aliens, have a litter of alien bubbas, buy a mansion and live with your 12 little aliens and a robot butler, obviously. 


Another little thing that was quite interesting about this research was the fact that participants with parents who were divorced, often made their sims divorce each other. When you think about it though, it's pretty obvious that if you were recreating your life in a virtual world, you'd recreate everything. However, it's when people play for different reasons that these shared values and personalities become significant. For example, people play to feed a God complex, wanting to control everything through the 3rd person view of the birds eye camera. People play to have their virtual self go through experiences that they themselves are too scared to complete, they use the sim as a test subject for their life, even creating a potential partner to see how a real life relationship would turn out. 


So, this post has the capacity to be very boring if you're not a simmer. However, if you have, like myself, been addicted to the series since The Sims 1 came out on playstation and it broke and then your Dad bought you The Sims 2 on PC, hopefully you can identify some of the aspects of different sim use in your play. We can even go as far as to predict The Sims becoming an unconventional tool for use in future psychological research or treatments, as it has the capacity to become more realistic than the usual Rorschach tests and dolls. 


I play The Sims for a break. I suppose in some ways I do project myself into some of my households, but I don't consciously create a sim that represents myself and see myself in different situations. A lot of my families are actually quite different to my own life, I have sporty sims for example, whereas my exercise for the day is walking from the living room to the fridge. I think that's because The Sims can become an tool for escapism, creating a life that's totally different to your own that you can control and dictate is a lot more fun than research for English Lit, or essays for English Language. 


So, if you are a simmer, or have ever played The Sims, why do you play? Are you a psychopath who has run out of live victims and need to torture the virtual? Are you bored of your life and would prefer an alien brood? 

BYE 

Is Nintendo's innovation causing more harm than good?

So, with the Sony recently claiming that the new Wii U console is 'in its own generation', it's impossible not to think of Nintendo's many generations. Nintendo are not necessarily seen as the leaders of gaming technology by everyone - there are the X-boxers and the lovers of Sony. However, it can be noted that Nintendo have led many console developments. The Nintendo Wii was at the forefront of a brand new type of motion controlled console gaming, paving the technological roads for X-box kinect and the PS3. The 3DS is the first console to have fully functional 3D, with capacity for the manipulation of this asset in the form of a 3D adjuster. This is certainly the first that the gaming world has come into contact to which has been widely recognised as a leading innovation.
However, as we all know, I am a total Nintendo whore, and this information is not totally tainted with my totally biased views. It cannot be ignored that the Nintendo Wii is definitely the weakest of the motion controlled consoles. It's the least powerful, disregards many possible applications and uses of the motion feature in many games, and is not generally seen as what can only be described as a 'big boy's console', it's been designed for Nintendo's basic games (Nintendo Sport, Nintendo Party etc.) and it shows. Even though Nintendo paved the way for motion gaming, they have been left behind. So, can it be assumed that X-box and Sony are going to take 3D technology, and create a console better than the 3DS and, having learnt Nintendo's pricing mistakes, overtake the original 3D console with an even better platform. This is what we saw with the Nintendo Wii, and it looks like Sony are already eyeing up the Wii U technology, eager to participate in this new 'generation' of gaming.